It is the misfortune of unusual films to fall between any number of stools, commercially and critically speaking, and to risk not finding their audience. A case in point is Joe Tucker’s comic thriller Lava, which is being re-released this month 15 years after it was made and 13 years since it finally got a pitifully small London release.

The picture resembles the result of a bizarre experiment – what might happen, say, if a cast of Mike Leigh characters were let loose in a Tarantino movie with a disquieting Blue Jam-style soundtrack. The result is even more distinctive than that. It follows Smiggy (Tucker) and Philip (James Holmes), two loser-loners who bungle a mission to avenge the savage beating of Philip’s brother.

In mid-carnival Notting Hill, the pair come nose-to-nose and weapon-to-weapon with snarling Yardie drug-dealers, white-boy Jamaican wannabes and, most terrifying of all, Julie (Nicola Stapleton), a young mum who would sell her own son for a line of coke.

The production design (by Philip Robinson) and cinematography (by Roger Eaton and Ian Liggett) is already trippy long before the characters start on the Class As. The council flat where much of the action takes place has garish walls of purple, orange and lime that make it seems like a kindergarten for this gallery of sociopaths. Some short-sighted critics were quick to see the film as yet another latecomer to the Guy Ritchie Brit-crime bandwagon, citing the proliferation of drugs and guns and tough-nuts.

But the magic of Tucker’s screenplay is that it undermines every apparent act of bravado. The Yardies may be intimidating but they are also buffoons; the psychopath whose actions put Philip’s brother in a wheelchair can barely open his mouth without making an admission of his own vulnerability. There aren’t any heroes here; the laddishness of Ritchie’s films, as well as the hipness of Tarantino’s, is entirely absent.

No one would mistake Smiggy, with his desperate military lingo and ineptitude with weapons, for anything but a hopped-up Andy McNab fan. Stalking Julie’s flat, he warns whoever happens to be listening to “stay in the neutral zone” in case of “negligent discharge in the field”. (I was reminded of I’m Alan Partridge, which was made two years later, in which Alan tells his assistant Lynn to “remove yourself from the theatre of conflict – go and stand by the Yakults”.)

The film’s most striking scene comes when Smiggy snorts cocaine for the first time. “It tastes like the smell of dead ants,” he announces, then farts triumphantly. “Every kind of experience for Smiggy is in a way gastronomic,” the Leicester-born Tucker told me at the time of the picture’s release. “It’s that provincial thing of big breakfasts, big dinners, everything food-oriented, shovelling it down. He’s based on a few guys I’ve met. It’s that working-class Leicester background, petty and banal.”

Lava had its fans at the time, among them Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentlemen. Mike Leigh (who directed Tucker in Career Girls) endorsed it and even wrote to Gilles Jacob, then head of the Cannes Film Festival, to encourage him to view this “most remarkable debut.”

Pete Clark in the Evening Standard called it “a British film of rare vitality, brimming with wit, and shot in short, interlocking scenes that demand full attention”. Tim Robey in the Telegraph admitted it was “rather accomplished in a pungent, acquired-taste sort of way”, while Nicholas Barber in the Independent on Sunday described it as “Reservoir Dogs remade by Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson”  and said “the film has its own look and the characters have their own voices”.

Perhaps the distance that we now have from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its imitators will allow audiences to take a chance, and to see Lava for the original and challenging anomaly that it is.

Lava is on DVD now.

Tom Blenkinsop’s phone vibrates as he pulls away from his tiny constituency office in Guisborough, a pretty village in his Middlesbrough South constituency that is a mere five miles from SSI’s Teesside’s steelworks but feels a world away. It’s Redcar MP Anna Turley phoning to check in and swap notes. Their conversation - and sometimes industrial-strength language - betrays a deep frustration with the lack of communication from official receivers and Teesside site’s owners.

Blenkinsop was working as the trade union liaison the last time the steelworks were under threat, mothballed by the previous owners Tata; Turley is one of Labour's 2015 intake with a strong background as a SPAD and in local government. 

The two young MPs are the vanguard of the region’s desperate effort to save the Redcar works - the second biggest blast furnace in Europe, capable of producing 9m tonnes of steel slab every year. But they are operating in a political vacuum that seems determined to consign the Teesside plant to history, even while its coke ovens still burn.

Tom Blenkinsop, Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland

It’s an impression that the Conservative government has done little to assuage, with repeated refusals of state intervention, lamentations of a tough market and protestations that EU regulations forbid any interference. Blenkinsop rolls his eyes at the suggestion.

“As soon as SSI went into liquidation the government was legally able to intervene as EU law only covers companies that are trading. That site isn’t trading. What’s more European law is interpretative: the government could intervene on the basis of health and safety and environmental grounds. In the case of Redcar there is a clear health and safety issue on two counts. If you walk out on coke ovens you have a bomb on site and SSI had not been paying liability insurance, so employees were working without coverage.

“If a government has to rescue an asset - an asset that can be protected and used in the future - that’s not intervention or nationalisation. It’s simply regulation, in the same way that we regulate railways to keep them running if the private sector fails.”

The awarding of HS2 contracts to Chinese companies on top of a cheap £45m loan to a company owned by Roman Abramovich that will be used to fund steelworks in Canada raises more questions about the government’s thinking on industry and infrastructure. Blenkinsop has little doubts as to where priorities lie.

“It all points to a strategy of managing decline and there doesn’t seem to be any understanding that there is a market to take advantage of there - particularly in recyclable steel. The technology is there to form steel on-site, reducing overall costs and able to compete against emerging markets. It means you can recycle scrap and take on Turkey and China without bringing in iron ore, so there’s an environmental consideration too.”

Business ministers Sajid Javid and Anna Soubry have stuck to the party line about difficult trading conditions on the open market - a tonne of iron ore was at point selling for less than $45, cheaper than a tonne of cabbages. Yet Blenkinsop argues there is a clear strategic imperative in ensuring a domestic supply when prices do recover, lest the UK be at the mercy of a Chinese monopoly. Blenkinsop has little faith in Sajid Javid - “an ex-Deutsche Bank bean-counter” - and laments the departure of Vince Cable from the Commons, and Michael Fallon to Defence.

“Before the election we had Cable at BIS, who did understand the situation but had no power and lacked the will to challenge Tory ministers. Fallon also got it but was more interested in the foreign affairs and defence. We’re now lumbered with Javid, who doesn’t understand the economic benefits of an industrial base.”

Born in Middlesbrough, the grandson of a steelworker, Blenkinsop’s background in the union movement has afforded him a knowledge of the industry’s history, geography and processes unlikely to be matched in any future parliaments.

“Steel is cyclical but it has been cyclical and declining since the 70s as new players have entered the market. The steel market has been moving eastward but there’s a problem with Chinese steel - it tends to be contaminated with boron, which has welding implications. As a result companies across Europe are refusing to use Chinese steel. It’s questionable whether Chinese steel will be at all usable in construction and lots of trading houses in Europe are refusing to use it because they think it’s dangerous.

“I find it bizarre that the Chancellor is going to use Chinese steel for HS2 when you could get it from Scunthorpe, which supplies rail, in HS2. But then we’re actually less competitive than our EU competitors because the government unilaterally imposed the CPF tax.”

The rigorous and unilateral imposition of a Climate Change levy - prompting SSI UK COO Cornelius Louwrens to wryly observe that the coalition government was ‘very good at being good’ - and the lack of promised assistance to the energy-hungry sector has begged questions as to whether the government fully understands the plight of its domestic heavy industry.

Redcar's steelworks, seen from the beach.

But the last straw has been the amounts of state-owned Chinese steel being dumped on the market well below cost value - amid dark mutterings from Australian iron ore mines of thousands of tonnes stored under water by a Chinese government waiting to unleash it on the market.

While Germany’s protectionist instincts are masked by a raft of licensing and regulation and various blue-chip French companies are partly owned by the state, Italy has temporarily nationalised the large Ilva steel plant, rather than submit to the market, on the grounds of health and safety. The lack of protection for foundation industries afforded by the Conservative government has north-eastern eyes looking across the English Channel in envy.

In the days preceding the company’s collapse Anna Soubry’s visit to the region to protest her anger at the lack of communication from SSI - from production to pause to liquidation within two weeks - was met with scepticism. However few on Teesside would dispute that the Thai company had not been without difficulties. Stories abound of vital equipment not replaced, over-indebtedness and logistical errors - blamed on a callow parent company and relative lack of managerial experience on site.

Even so, Redcar was edging towards the black during 2014 and the site enjoyed extremely high productivity - a tribute to the efforts of its dedicated workforce. Without the Chinese economic shock of 2015 it’s likely the site would have made money again. Still, the site’s problems were hardly a secret, prompting Blenkinsop to question how much the government really knew - and when.

“For the last eight months there was a lot of of money owed to local companies, plus issues with pension payments. SSI couldn’t pay their business rates - there were a lot of distress signals the company was sending out. Anna Soubry let it slip just after the liquidation announcement that the Insolvency Service had been monitoring the situation for months. It’s inconceivable that the civil service wasn’t briefing ministers so they must have known.”

The perilous position of SSI has been an open secret among workers, local politicians and press since the blast furnace was relit and production recommenced in April 2011. A BBC reporter directly described the company as a "basket case" on the regional Look North programme. Local MPs have repeatedly persuaded pre-eminent regional newspaper the Northern Echo to spike stories reporting SSI’s difficulties, lest it create a run on the company or panic among creditors.

It’s a surprising move from a newspaper, yet also an indication of the solidarity that the region displays in relation to the steelworks. For two weeks mining company Hargreaves Services supplied coal to the coke ovens - vital for the site’s ongoing viability in producing steel - out of its own pocket. It’s here where the region’s desperation to maintain the site - and the government’s indifference - has been pivotal.

Sajid Javid has been criticised for his response to the crisis.

Without more coal the coke ovens collapse in on themselves and without the mothballing work that Tata Steel put into the site in 2010, when steelmaking was last halted, the blast furnace also becomes unviable. Even as the last coke was pushed through the ovens on October 15th, both assets were described as ‘not going concerns’ on the Insolvency Service’s website. At the same time Turley was in Parliament virtually begging the government for a stay of execution as new interested parties came forward with offers for the plant.

The ‘hard’ closure that the government receiver has insisted on has essentially scuttled a site that has received around £1bn of investment over the last 10 years and was thought to have an operational life of another 20 years. Turley has described the lack of intervention as “industrial sabotage”.

Confusion reigns over exactly what the government knew about SSI’s difficulties over the course of 2015 - and what their real position is. Blenkinsop has been told that the Insolvency Service knew of the works’ mounting debt months ago and also claims that Soubry admitted to Middlesbrough MP Andy McDonald that the government should have mothballed the plant.

The speed of the site’s closure enraged the region’s MPs, but it has been shattering to local workers. Job centres, colleges and local GPs know the rhythms of this regional catastrophe - of men with skills few others can boast but helpless when faced with a computer; of fear, anxiety and depression. Against the backdrop of political intrigue are thousands of stories of lives upturned by the news of impending unemployment: holidays cancelled, cars sold and mortgage payments nervously awaited.

They are stories that have been detailed by the blog of Anna Maven, wife of Paul and the woman behind the popular Steelworker’s Wife blog. As Paul is coming to terms with the loss of a job he had coveted and treasured at SSI, Anna has been pouring her thoughts into a humble WordPress blog that has been deluged with hundreds of hits every day. Recent events have driven local and national media to the Maven household. It’s made for a surreal few weeks

“It’s been a bit of fun,” admits Anna.. “But it’s not a good time for us. It hasn’t really sunk in. I think it will when Paul doesn’t get paid. I don’t want to get down about it and that’s why I’ve written about it. It’s been therapeutic. I keep saying to Paul that we just have to remain positive.”

“You go through a lot of phases,” adds Paul. It’s 8 October, the day before he would have been due back at work. “Numbness, disbelief, shock - ‘this can’t happen, I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll have been dreaming’. On Friday Anna Soubry was coming up to Redcar and we thought we could ride it out. Come lunchtime on Monday there it was - the letter telling you your job is now over. But you still don’t believe it."

“You go through it all - why me? After a week I’m coming to terms with it. There might be a chance in five or six years’ time that we might go back. You never know what might happen.”

Anna is less certain - a self-confessed pessimist to Paul’s half-full outlook. “Paul always thinks the best is going to happen. He said if he could go back he would - but I don’t want to go through it again. When you have a family and mortgage you need some security.”

A view along one of Redcar's backstreets.

The pair live in Anna’s mother’s house with their two young children and have a mortgage on a one-bedroom house that is rented out by tenants. Anna works full-time as a teaching assistant.

“It could be a lot worse for us. We’ve got no savings and we can’t afford to sell our house - which would currently be at a loss. But we’ve got this house over heads, so we’re aware of how much worse things could be. Paul would leave the house at 5.15am and do a 12-hour shift so we had a little dream that we could move closer to Redcar. But that’s not going to happen now.”

Despite the safety net of the house, they’ve felt the necessity to cut back immediately. The daughter’s swimming lessons have been cancelled and trips out to the theatre and restaurants are on hold. One of the two cars may be sold. But it’s the emotional impact that is felt most keenly. Anna describes the father of her children walking around the house in tears, grieving at the loss of a job that not only afforded them the chance a larger house but was also a source of enormous pride, camaraderie and honour.

“It has improved our lifestyle a lot,” adds Anna. “But now that is going to stop. When you’ve got kids you want to make sure they have what they want and for them to experience things.”

When Paul applied for a job at Redcar at his wife’s urging, and upon becoming a member of the fledgling SSI UK family, he found a pride he had not previously known through work.

“When I signed Monica’s birth certificate I was so proud to sign it “steelworker”. I will still call myself a steelworker even if I never work there again.”

“It was the dream job,” nods Anna.

SSI UK was run by the heir to the Sahaviriya Steel empire, Win Viriyaprapaikit, initially with long-time site boss Phil Dryden and latterly Cornelius Louwrens. Dryden left in 2014 to work at nearby Hargreaves, responsible for supplying the last of the coal pushed through ovens. His departure worried some steel watchers, but Louwrens was seen as a safe pair of hands and a straight talker on the company’s difficulties.

“Mr Win and Mr Dryden were the heroes initially,” says Paul of the day the blast furnace was relit - a true phoenix from the ashes moment. “But we haven’t seen nor heard of Mr Win for weeks. Cornelius was left to take all the flack. He couldn’t get anything from Thailand - they would put the phone down on him. He was kept out of the loop completely.

“We were struggling but we were told to hold tight. We thought they’d have something up their sleeves. Then we found out the last four months of our pension contributions have gone missing - they’ve kept it and they haven’t put their money into the pension fund for four months. Some people were paying up to a maximum of 35 per cent into the pension pots. It turned out that we hadn’t been insured to work on the site for the last six months too.”

The unspoken reality of men working uninsured in as dangerous an environment as a steelworks is as astonishing as it is appalling. It has clearly come as a shock to a workforce who thought, despite the rumours, they were all in it together.

“Mr Win brought the steelmaking back, but he’s let himself down,” says Paul ruefully.

The SSI steelworks, shrouded in mist.

There are some jobs around - Nissan is on the doorstep and Paul passed the first stage of the application process. But he seems less sure than Anna that the door is closed on Redcar.

“We’re not asking the government to take over the site - just to mothball it so people could go back to their jobs. It would be a tragedy, after 170 years, for it to be closed in two weeks and pulled down for scrap.”

Many in Sunderland recognise the downturn in fortunes the loss of local heavy industry heralds. The Mavens’ house was once surrounded by the kind of works that are synonymous with the region - a pit and a shipyard on either side. Now in their place there’s an enormous Tesco and the unfortunately-named Stadium of Light, where Sunderland play. It’s handy for Paul but there’s an irony here too. A huge Black Cats fan, he had just arranged his next year’s work rota around the team’s fixtures.

As well as confusion over the reality of the government's much-vaunted £80m rescue package for the region - quickly whittled down to £40-50m once statutory redundancy payments were subtracted, another sleight of hand that has angered Teessiders - both are frustrated by the government’s limp response. Neither would claim to be political, but they show a keen awareness of the social impact of industrial decline on their hometown.

“We’re in the North East - we’ve had it done to us with the mines and shipyards,” says Anna. “I know from living in Sunderland all my life how detrimental it’s been here - it will be the same for Redcar. I’ve always worked with young people and it’s no surprise that they’re disadvantaged - they have no aspirations and they have nothing to look up to.

“Now it’s all gone. I think it’s why drugs and alcohol have become such a big thing in the city and the pit villages. We used to breed kids who would grow up to be hard workers. Now without the industry and the unemployment there are four or five generations of children who haven’t worked and the kids get sent to work in a call-centre. When a city has an industry it breeds a strong work ethic but it’s just not like that now.”

Seeing the government’s spokespersons repeat claims they believe to be hollow every night on the television has been angering and wearying for the pair - much of which has found an outlet in Anna’s blog.

“It’s not 1700 men - it’s 1700 men’s wives; 1700 men’s children. It’s thousands of people - all the contractors and local businesses. When they quote that figure of 1700... well it’s not 1700. But when people feel like they’ve lost everything they’ll come together.”

Paul agrees but he’s keen not to romanticise the lot of a steelworker and his wife too much.

“It is really hard work - we got very well paid for it but they worked us really hard. You can be a second away from death. But it was the best four years I’ll ever have though.It’s a way of life. It’s a brotherhood…”

“I’m sick of all these cliches,” laughs Anna. “You all sign off their text messages to each other with ‘love you’ and kisses, don’t you?”.

“We are a brotherhood! So it’s very tight knit. One of the lads’ wives was giving birth while all this was going on. And I had to tell him not to bother coming back into work. Another couple met at the works and have both lost their jobs - another lad is away on his honeymoon.”

Anna Turley, MP for Redcar

A softly-spoken, easy-going man Paul is not a man who appears quick to anger. But there’s an edge in his voice as he laments the government's lack of vision.

“It’s just been a privilege working there and it shouldn’t be happening. It should have been looked after by the government. In six or eight month’s time China will have a monopoly on steel and it will go up to $800 per tonne - they’ll claw our eyes out for a tonne of steel. We’ll realise we should have kept our steelworks open.”

Paul shrugs.

“That’s life really though isn’t it - not much you can do about it. “

Anna agrees.

“It’s been a funny old week hasn’t it?”

The story of the stricken steelworks has been framed in the media as a sad but inevitable consequence of globalisation, the transition to a service economy and the death throes of an industrial base past its time. Yet Teesside MPs point to the strategic value of domestic steelmaking, opportunities for taking on developing markets with hi-tech innovation and the requirement in the UK for large amounts of steel due to infrastructure projects including HS2 and a new programme of nuclear power stations.

In light of the Conservative government’s continued narrative on a long-term economic plan, importance of productivity and much-vaunted Northern Powerhouse, the foot-shuffling response to SSI’s collapse has raised eyebrows. Teesside MPs believe between 6-9,000 jobs will go directly and in the supply chain on Teesside, yet the truth is no-one is aware of the likely impact on employment, GDP and externalities across the north-east - already suffering from high unemployment. Anna Turley claims there up to 11 parties interested in taking over the site - and workers believe there is a potential buyer lined up for the coke ovens.

Still the government has done nothing - arguing that it will instead assisted with re-skilling those affected, redirecting them to SMEs or encouraging self-employment.

“17,000 job losses with pension plans and good wages of £30-40K a year - whatever they find themselves doing there won’t be the same security,” says Tom Blenkinsop. He argues that the government’s numbers simply don’t make any sense in light of the fallout of such a massive economic primer - not to mention the cost of a site covering several square miles and with 100 years of dirty work behind itl being dismantled.

“For the same money that’s being thrown around in terms of the rescue packages you could mothball the works so we can start it up again. Our latest estimates suggest that to clean up that site  - full of arsenic and heavy metals leaching into the ground -  would cost north of £3bn to decontaminate that site.

The Middlesbrough MP sees the lack of help from the Conservative government as a fundamental misunderstanding of an economy increasingly unbalanced by a tendency towards financial products and services.

“There’s this prevailing assumption that heavy industry will go east. But the white-collar economy is also moving eastwards. You need a blended, diverse economy to compete globally. There’s a real lack of comprehension that legal, clerical and financial services are going east. You need services to circulate around the primers that are generating the value.”

“We always wanted to diversify the economy on Teesside and we’ve seen city regeneration but ultimately they are diversifications from the core, which is steel and processing industries. But if the worst comes to the worst nothing will fill that hole in the next 20-30 years. You’re not going to fill that gap.”

Jeremy Corbyn meets Xi Jinping, China's President. Britain is becoming increasingly reliant on Chinese steel.

Already a net importer of steel despite the domestic capacity, the UK can only become more reliant on foreign steel, of less certain provenance and quality. It highlights another traditional perceived importance of a country owning its foundation industries.

“I’m pro-China,” says Blenkinsop. “But you need your own foundation industries and if you find yourself in a situation where you need to arm yourself or put more money into civil defence, you don’t want to be reliant on someone else supplying it. We’re making massive mistakes by allowing our sites that have the ability to make varying grades of metals to die off. What do you make weapons or submarines or Trident out of?”

Mention of Trident is a reminder of issues closer to home. Blenkinsop may be a union man from the North East but, with a Masters in Continental Philosophy and politics that would see him described as a moderniser, he’s no typical Labour bruiser. He makes no secret of his frustration with a party leadership he sees as indulging itself over issues his constituents - and many more outside London - simply do not care about.

It’s another source of bemusement to the MP that, on the day the SSI redundancies were announced, the steelworkers union was voted off the NEC in favour of the bakers’ union. The timing could not be more perverse, nor the switch more symbolic of a Labour Party undergoing an identity crisis. In steel’s hour of need the Labour Party shut the door in the steelworkers’ face. Blenkinsop gives the impression that the familiar truism about having to be in power to wield it are more clear than ever. To him, the Conservative government is wrecking the industry without knowing or caring how or why.

“Ultimately they just don’t have a plan for steel. There is no national strategy for foundation industries. This is a national steel crisis and ignoring it won’t make it go away.

The day before the last of the coal was pushed through the coke ovens at Redcar, south Teesside’s three MPs could be seen hopping up and down on the backbenches during the new Parliament’s second PMQs.

Blenkinsop, Turley and Andy McDonald tried in vain to catch John Bercow’s eye, but to no avail. They wanted to ask the Prime Minister to his face if he truly understood what his government were doing; to plead for a stay of execution - three months for up to 11 interested parties to compete due diligence and raise capital to purchase the site and its assets. None were called.

Minutes later a furious Blenkinsop’s voice trembles with rage down the phone, as if the trauma of the previous four weeks has caught up with him.

“Anna Soubry admitted last night to Andy McDonald in the tearoom that they should have mothballed it. We’ve got buyers in the wings waiting to buy the plant but they need time and they won’t give us it. When Anna Soubry says she cannot overrule the receiver it is untrue. It is completely untrue. She can instruct the receiver to keep it going, to keep the plant open and give people time.”

Mothballing the furnace and keeping the coke ovens burning over three months would cost around £40m, at another £10m per month the ovens would burn hot until the start of the new financial year in April - a sum that would cost the government the same amount as the supposed £80m of money committed to redundancy payments and retraining for the area. But the government will not budge. Two days later on October 16th hundreds more jobs in the Teesside supply chain go - and there’s news that Tata that make 1200 people redundant at its UK plants. Sajid Javid, attending the Rotherham steel summit, looks as if he has only just understood the enormity of the crisis facing the industry when he receives the news.

By the end of the week the nightmare scenario that Blenkinsop and plenty more on Teesside have feared most has come to pass - the hard closure of the Redcar blast furnace and abandonment of the coke ovens ensures their destruction. The unspoken reality is that it might do the same for the region and precipitate the last rites for the UK’s steel industry.

“Revenue to HMRC will drop, GDP for the region will go through the floor and dole queues will go through the roof,” says Blenkinsop. “It will cost billions of tax-payer’s money to decontaminate the site. There is no logic to it. This is a political decision. It’s as simple as that now - it’s a political decision to kill that plant."

“They have fucked us. They have totally fucked us.”

Redcar's coke ovens. 

William Gladstone called Teesside “an infant Hercules”. At the turn of the century over 100 blast furnaces lined the river Tees as iron ore, coal and limestone from the region flooded towards Middlesbrough, Redcar and Darlington. The resulting steel from Redcar was used in the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Wembley Stadium and Canary Wharf; the list of notable constructions wide and varied, spanning the world and Twentieth Century alike. As the poet Ian Horn says: Every metropolis; Came from Ironopolis.

But even at its height years ago there was trouble on the horizon. In 1913 shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman warned that iron and steel trades on Teesside were threatened with foreign competition and undercutting of prices at a speech in Hartlepool. Surplus dumping of steel was resulting in narrower margins and there was a clear risk for associated industries and communities. It’s the perfect summation of an brutal industry whose future has always looked precarious - a bellweather industry intensely sensitive to market fluctuations.

100 years ago the industrial and strategic importance of domestic steelmaking would be brutally thrown into relief by events on the continent - by 1917 the Dorman Long Redcar Steelworks were scraping the sky down the coast from Hartlepool, during the height of The Great War.

There is no such imperative now, but many of the economic and strategic considerations remain the same. British steel is being driven to oblivion, like the last of the coke pushed through the cooling ovens at Redcar. For the people raised in the shadow of the blast furnace that has stood as a totem on Teesside for 35 years - a symbol of pride, hard work and defiance - it has been trapped in a pincer movement of dirty tricks on the global markets and the indifference of a government that seems to be realising too late what a colossal error it has made.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been accused of absolving Adolf Hitler in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.

In the speech, he suggested that the WWII Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini inspired the Holocaust:

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’

'So what should I do with them?' he [Hitler] asked. He [the mufti] said: 'Burn them.'"

Set against the rich history of bullshit whimsical celebrity baby names – Pilot Inspektor Lee, Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette, Apple Martin – Elsie Otter is actually quite sensi-

No. Hang on. It seems I’ve been brainwashed into thinking Elsie Otter is an acceptable name. Which it definitely isn’t. At least, not for a girl. But I’ll get to that later.

In the least surprising move since my cat ate some cat food, self-appointed Queen of Quirkiness Zooey Deschanel and whoever her schmuck husband is have named their baby daughter after a literal woodland critter.  

I’ve resented Deschanel since around 2007, when she hijacked awkwardness. As someone genuinely uncomfortable in her own skin, I can be certain – in an age of uncertainty – of one thing: having enormous eyes and playing the ukulele doesn’t make you awkward.

As someone who was bullied at school for (among so many other things) being shit at sports, someone who dances like a reanimated cadaver and someone who has been told, on more than one occasion, to “shut up” during sex, I feel I’ve earned the authority to judge who/what can be considered dorky. And Deschanel is to genuine dorkiness what Starbucks is to coffee. That is to say, she’s ruined it with caramel.    

But, contrary to all of this, I think “Otter” is an absolutely brilliant name. For a boy.

When parents inflict a sickeningly cutesy name on a daughter they’re (unwittingly, I hope) defining her by her cuteness – something that a massive chunk of society was going to do even before they gave her a name that would look stupid on a Bichon Frisé. Either they’re blind to the fact that women have a hard enough time being taken seriously without being called Marshmallow Twinkletits, or they don’t plan on taking their daughter seriously themselves.

So, if idiot parents feel a biological imperative to name their children after “aDORKable” things, I think they should go for it. My one caveat is that they bestow these names on their sons rather than their daughters. Because naming a boy “Otter” may not be revolutionary, but it would definitely take one white, middle-class man down a notch.

For the most part, girls seem to bear the brunt of the stupid name tradition. Just look at the nowadays “consciously uncoupled” Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. Their son, Moses, is named after a Biblical badass who parted an entire sea and led thousands of slaves to freedom. Their daughter is named after some fruit.

When naming my siblings and me, my parents’ one rule was that, on the off chance any of us wanted to be prime minister or something, our names wouldn’t hold us back. And, aged 26 and still living with them, boy have I made the most of my apparently PM-worthy name.

But yeah, had I been named Kitten Banana Froot Loop the Fourth, I’m pretty certain I’d be living in a cardboard box and eating ants.

I’m all for freedom of choice though, and if, say, a Gertrude reaches 18 and decides she’d rather be called Princess Butter, then all power to her. Had someone chosen the name “Princess Butter” for her, when she was too busy working out how to keep her head up to grapple with concepts like sexism, things may have turned out badly. And by “badly”, I mean she resents her butter-obsessed parents throughout her teens, then pulls a Zowie Bowie and changes her name to Duncan. Then becomes an accountant just to piss off her delightfully whimsically-minded parents who were banking on her becoming a fire eater or something butter-related. Come to think of it, things turned out OK for this particular fictional absurdly-named woman.

Meanwhile, her brother – a Clive, probably – becomes the billionaire CEO of a multinational corporation that makes baby oil by literally pressing babies. Maybe he should’ve been named Princess Butter.

Dear Seumas,

First things first, congratulations – you have one of the great jobs in politics. When you believe in something there is nothing better than trying to steer it to success. You are already experiencing one of the great paradoxes of your position – you have lost your voice. Yesterday you could write, say, tweet whatever you wanted – you were Chairman, Chief Executive and sole employee of Seumas Milne Enterprises. Today, you are a staffer – a man who lives in the shadows. As someone who has written well and controversially on many things there will be many of your words thrown at you. You will be mocked, maligned and misrepresented – and not only must you not answer back, you can’t, you simply can’t. Don’t be drawn into a fight, however tempting – and it is, the aim is to make you angry. And anger fogs the mind, preventing you from doing what you have to do – be strategic.

That is the central part of your job as Director of Strategy and Communications. You are not a spinner or a press secretary – you employ them and you should not do their jobs for them and if the staff aren’t up to it then replace them rather than supplant or substitute for them. There are many staff who can get you to next Tuesday and then on to the Sunday after and so on. Your job is to get to May 2020 with a proposition for the country – and the truth is you don’t have much time. This is not that you only have one chance to make a first impression. Actions and events make and remake reputation repeatedly – just look at George Osborne’s regular journey from hero to zero and back again. The point is one that David Plouffe made after the first Obama victory – you inevitably always have limited resources. So, every day, every staff hour, every speech, every leaflet, every pound spent off strategy is irretrievably wasted.

Given that strategy is one of the most misused terms in politics it is worth remembering another of Plouffe’s sayings – ‘there is a narrow path to victory’. Strategy is discerning that path, discipline is sticking to it. Everything hangs on getting that right. Start with the facts. Politics is a Maslowian hierarchy – the base is security, the middle is delivery (or competence) and at the top is aspiration - the kind of country and society they want to live. If you cannot convince on security – economic, homeland, national, environmental – then you aren’t heard on public services. If you are not trusted on delivery of health and education then it does not matter what your vision of the good society is – however wonderful. Too often the left starts with collective aspiration and all the great things we can do, forgetting the scaffolding. Map where Labour is and where the Tories are. Be honest – whole sight, or all the rest is desolation. And then plan how to wrest topics from the Tories one by one, and own and occupy them for Labour. A fight over hospital deficits is about competence not about privatisation – the former disconfirms and damages the overall Tory brand, the latter just makes Labour feel good. Cuts to tax credits and job losses in steel are about insecurity domestically and globally. Always attach the stories, messages and actions of the day

Get the polling done. The party has no better pollster than James Morris. Use him, and listen to him. Do not for one moment believe in what you hope for. And never neglect to think like a Tory – if your polling is right, and if it’s not why are you paying for it, then Cameron and Osborne are seeing similar figures. Harold Wilson would always interrupt Bob Worcester’s polling presentations with the simple question – ‘What will the Tories do with this?’ Plans disintegrate on contact with the enemy because they have plans of their own. Think through what they will be doing and plan to block or disrupt it. But do not for one moment believe in what you hope for. Every vote has to be fought for and won and re-won. As the Labour Party Organisation Department used to say – the victory of ideals must be organised.

Get planning. A good strategy is not a guarantee of victory but having none ensures defeat. Start with the end-point – the election date – and plan backwards. The main political events of the next five years are almost entirely predictable – they have a merciless rhythm. Plot a path through them. Take advice widely, there are good ideas out there. But once a course is set stick to it – don’t let the monkeys in the cheap seats throw peanuts at you.

Above all, enjoy it. You’ll never be bored.

Yours in solidarity,

John

The United Nations this week will again debate the Middle East. As the diplomats enter its New York HQ they will walk under an Akkadian copy of the “Eternal Treaty”. Signed in 1259BC, it grandly aimed to “establish peace and brotherhood for all time”. In what is often regarded as the first negotiated peace treaty, the Hittite king Hattusili III and Pharaoh Ramesses II concluded two centuries of conflict after the Battle of Kadesh, in modern-day Syria. But although that country may be the cradle of peace diplomacy there’s unlikely to be any need to hammer another nail into those UN walls to hang up a new Syrian agreement.

Against this backdrop, MPs will consider RAF raids against Isis positions in Syria two years after parliament voted on air strikes on Assad. In conceiving this monthly column, I decided not to be a commentator on Labour’s all-too-irregular ups and all-too-frequent downs. I’ve refused three approaches to write a book about what may be the most traumatic six months in Labour’s history. Each offer was financially rewarding but none was in the party’s best interests. But I do want to talk about what happened in that vote on 29 August 2013.

As shadow defence secretary, I knew that what was on the table was a very limited RAF campaign against the Assad government. It was a million miles from regime change by military means. Modern mythology believes that MPs were against the possible use of force. In truth, 270 MPs voted for the government motion and 220 backed Labour’s variant of a similar policy. Both proposed a conditions-based posture on British action – and they had the backing of 490 MPs in total. Labour voted against the government while not expecting to win. The government voted against Labour while not expecting to lose.

That night I didn’t join in the customary cheers of some opposition MPs that greeted the government’s defeat. How could I? We hadn’t just won a vote to protect family tax credits. Assad had dropped chemical weapons on schoolchildren in their playground. Parliament had contrived to do nothing about it. Instead, I had a furious row with Michael Gove as we loudly traded industrial language in full view of dozens of MPs. Over the next few days, I stretched the elastic of collective responsibility to snapping point. I wrote about how uneasy I felt about the outcome and urged parliament to think again.

Yet as time has passed I know I shouldn’t just have written about it. I should have stood down from the shadow cabinet in the hours before the vote. Of the hundreds of votes over 18 years in parliament, 29 August 2013 was the one occasion I allowed commitment to my party to defeat my sense of right and wrong. I should have been true to myself. I will always regret not being so.

Two years on, this summer, prominent politicians were under more pressure over whether they would lend their spare room to refugees, rather than how they would use the power of the house to which they have been elected. Rightly, no government can bind its successor. Nor should any parliament be imprisoned by its predecessor. Of course, much has changed in politics since 2013, not least the presence of the 56 “anti-war” SNP MPs, who will oppose military action anywhere in the world to placate their new members in pursuit of a referendum rerun. And there are others who say it’s now too late to intervene. Many of them are the same people who claimed last time that it was too early to get involved.

I’ve heard the argument that military action won’t work. I agree: alone it would achieve little. An Iraq-type coalition of the willing won’t happen and in any case would fail. What’s more, the idea of a Lebanon-style power-sharing agreement is as naive as Isis is barbaric. The jihadists are too busy beheading innocents and rubbling antiquities to talk. There is no Hattusili or Rames­ses in their ranks.

I respect conscientious objectors and the Quaker traditions. At times in our history it has taken true courage to stand out from the crowd. But conscientious objection isn’t a legitimate posture for a P5 nation in the face of Isis ferocity. And when put on the spot about a Syrian strategy, too many politicians simply parrot the line: “We shouldn’t have attacked Iraq.” It’s a legitimate argument about the past. It’s not a plan about the future.

It all feeds into a sense that, after Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain has re-entered a period of unresolved purpose. After 1956 and the Suez humiliation, the British political class was shaken out of a foreign policy shaped by its past. In 1962, in the immediate shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson told West Point cadets: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” In 1968 George Ball, a former undersecretary of state, wrote of a “special problem” rather than a special relationship. He thought Britain had become hamstrung by its history, and bemoaned “Englishmen reared on the heady heritage of exotic empire”.

The most important military decision in the coming months is not Syria but the Strategic Defence and Security Review. The new plan should commit the UK in law to the Nato defence spending target of 2 per cent of GDP. It’s right to enshrine the aid budget in law, and it’s not wrong to do the same for defence.

Britain still has so much going for it internationally. Yet our multinational nation state almost unravelled last year and may yet unwind from Europe. A lack of clarity about what it means to be British at home is matched by huge uncertainty about what Britain means abroad. Parliament should shortly get the responsibility to vote on air strikes. When it does, MPs will not only decide what they believe should happen in Syria, but also what they think of Britain.

A blue fluffy monster invaded the Department for Work and Pensions Twitter feed today. It stuck its head into its profile picture, and appeared in a series of toe-curling memes, including this one:

‘Pensions? Where we’re going we don’t need pensions…’ #DontIgnoreIt#BackToTheFuturehttps://t.co/fWkyXT9qBYpic.twitter.com/G1Pjx7P2oO

— DWP Press Office (@dwppressoffice) October 21, 2015

Far from a rejected character from Monsters, Inc., the monster is at the centre of a new advertising campaign to be launched by the DWP this evening. According to the campaign's press release, "Workie, a striking physical embodiment of the workplace pension" will "change the country’s perception of pensions in the workplace".

The first TV ad will be shown at 7:27pm this evening, between Emmerdale and Coronation Street. For those who just can't wait, it's already available on YouTube:

Pensions Minister Baroness Altman said the campaign, accompanied by the hashtag #DontForgetIt, hopes to raise awareness of workplace pensions, which by law must be introduced by all UK employers over the next three years:

This is a fun and quirky campaign but behind it lies a very serious message. We need everyone to know they are entitled to a workplace pension – and we need all employers to understand their legal responsibility to their staff, but also to feel more positive about engaging with workplace pensions.

The "fun" campaign also came with a steep price tag: the DWP confirmed earlier today that it set the department back £8.45m. Luckily, savings from slashing Independent Living Fund alone would easily have covered the cost. 

Diplomacy is about ambiguity, and Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, was a highly ambivalent figure. Of Polish extraction, he enjoyed a fine, bourgeois education, had a love of Heinrich Heine, Immanuel Kant and Mikhail Lermontov, and was admired by the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria. As an early Menshevik, Maisky never forgot his vulnerability, and as a Jew (born Jan Lacho­wiecki) who enjoyed foreign travel and who signed himself Jean rather than the Polish Jan or Russian Ivan, he fitted the profile of the “rootless cosmopolitan” neatly.

With their dramatised accounts of British policy and society in the pre-war world and later, his diaries are a feast, whether for the student of history, the war freak, or the incorrigibly credulous. Plausible, cultivated, sharp-witted, and free with his handouts of vodka and caviar, Maisky sold himself to Chamberlain, Beaverbrook, Eden, Churchill and others as their man in Moscow, as well as Stalin’s here.

Influence, however, was something else. Years of combating appeasement and pleading for a mutual security pact with Britain and France culminated in failure, first with the Munich Agreement, then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And after he downplayed British warnings, often based on Enigma intercepts, that Hitler was about to pounce on his Russian friends – thereby reinforcing Stalin’s crazy assumption that the Germans never would – Maisky campaigned indefatigably for a second front. By the time he was recalled in 1943 that, too, hadn’t happened.

Yet his highly informed analyses could be convincing. “Weak, vacillating, zigzagging, and retreating before the aggressor,” he reports in 1937, though moral disgust with the British seems strange, coming from a man in fear of a bullet to the head. “How can I or [his fellow Soviet diplomat Maksim] Litvinov conduct foreign policy with the Lubyanka across the way?” he later wrote, after Stalin began posting secret policemen to embassies to oversee their work. As policy was monopolised by Stalin and by Stalin’s protégé Vyacheslav Molotov, Maisky, trying to ingratiate himself, inflamed their suspicions by suggesting Neville Chamberlain was deliberately promoting “the Ukrainian direction” of Nazi aggression.

In explanatory passages, the editor of the diaries, Gabriel Gorodetsky, picks Maisky up on over-glossed conversations, switched dates and the like, though he praises him for his “subversive” methods of conveying his own ideas to Moscow for improved Anglo-Soviet relations by placing them in the mouths of the British.

An intimate of Tory governments, lionised by the intellectual left and delighting in the limelight and the comforts of capitalist life, both before and after 1939, Maisky enjoyed an excellent war era. His entries betray a tiresome interest in royalty and society, recording with satisfaction, for instance, Nancy Astor’s insistence that “you bloody Bolsheviks are good people”.

The entries here about British Stalin apologists, though occasionally revealing, are also over-frequent. We have H G Wells (“a fount of wisdom”) struggling to decide whether Lenin or Stalin was the greater, Lloyd George insisting that Soviet victories could “revolutionise the whole prospect of European democracy”, Bernard Shaw contributing similar fatuities, and a surfeit of Maisky’s close friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the New Statesman. An editorial reminder that their 1937 book Soviet Communism: a New Civilisation, overtaken by the Moscow Trials, contained a hasty endnote suggesting that the Soviet judicial system, in which miscreants honestly confessed, was superior to our own, where the guilty dissembled, would add context.

From Gorodetsky’s commentary, it never quite emerges that, together with covert sympathisers with Hitler, self-deluded admirers of Uncle Joe were also part of the low, dishonest decade. Yet Maisky boasts about steadying his leftist clientele over the show trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn Massacre or the shooting of up to 100 people after the murder of Sergei Kirov (“unpleasant”, but “better than to risk the lives of millions of workers and peasants”.) Soviet policies were examined by the “men of Munich”, Gorodetsky writes, “through an ideologically tinted prism.” Against this background, and with the Communist International still active, why wouldn’t they be?

Who is Maisky’s audience, you often wonder? Himself, posterity, or the Kremlin? His wife was instructed to send his diaries to Stalin if anything happened to him, which may account for some formulaic passages about our great communist future, or the loyal curses: “The potion was brewing in the imperialists’ infernal kitchen.”

Little point in asking who “the real Mais­ky” was. Among Bolshevik careerists, why would there be one? Certainly he was attached to his vision of a grand alliance with Britain with himself at its centre, and of a far-left postwar UK inclined towards Moscow. Churchill often told him that communism was preferable to the Nazis, although, as his celebrated 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, later showed, the implication was “one thing at a time”. How little about Britain, for all his fashionable contacts – and often because of them – Maisky actually understood.

Andrei Gromyko, the cold war-era minister of foreign affairs, whose own terse and colourless manner I recall all too well, complained in his memoirs that Maisky’s reports of conversations were “drowned in his own description of the situation”, and became “irritating to the leadership”. For the western reader, too.

For Maisky the 1952 denouement – arrest, torture and confession to being an English spy – was the sordid downside of his double life. He was saved by Stalin’s death but implicated in Beria’s bid for power, and it was 1960 before he was rehabilitated.

“How tragic for Maisky to go on paying a heavy price for his survival,” Gorodetsky writes. More tragic, surely, was the murder of 20,000 fellow Poles at Katyn, orchestrated by his admirer Beria, and which Maisky helped sell to credulous Britons as “a provocation by Goebbels that exceeded all bounds”. His diaries, an important historical document, would benefit from a less indulgent presentation.

George Walden is a former diplomat and MP. His latest novel, “The Oligarch”, written under the pen name Joseph Clyde, is published by Gibson Square

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943 by Ivan Maisky, ed. Gabriel Gorodetsky, is published by Yale University Press (£25, 584pp)

The 18th-century Prime Minister

23-29 October 2015

The government is headed for a bruising defeat on Monday over tax credits when the measure is voted on in the House of Lords. A cross-party alliance of peers - from the Tory backbenches, the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, and peers of no party at all - are all but certain to vote down the measure when it comes before the House of Lords. 

Usually, the unelected Lords cannot vote down finance measures - but the Treasury's decision to put the change through not as a financial bill but as a statutory instrument means the House of Lords can, on this occasion, vote down the measure.

The government is doing its utmost to avert the defeat. Baroness Meacher, a crossbench peer - peers who do not take the whip of any party in the House of Lords - came under pressure to withdraw her motion killing off the measure entirely, while Downing Street sources are briefing that defeating the cuts would lead to a mass creation of Conservative peers to rebalance the political composition of the Upper House. No government has "packed" the Lords in this way since 1711, when Queen Anne created nine new peers in order to create a majority for the treaty to end the War of the Spanish Succession.The threat of it alone was enough to force the Lords to vote through a bill limiting its power in 1911. 

The government's argument is that the Salisbury-Addison Convention - the deal brokered between Lord Salisbury, leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, and Lord Addison, leader of the Lords during the Labour government of 1945-51 - under which the House of Lords votes through all manifesto commitments means that the Upper House has no choice but to approve the measure. But there is a widespread view in the Lords that far from being a manifesto commitment, Cameron's pre-election promise on tax credits means that they are more than entitled to vote it down.

But it may be that the House of Lords are walking into a trap. The use of a statutory instrument, rather than a finance bill, has opened the government up to a defeat - but may give the government a pretext to reassert the longstanding Conservative primacy in the Upper House. Throughout the 1979-97 Conservative government, Tory peers were the largest single bloc of peers, and it wasn't until the final year of Tony Blair's government that the Labour group eclipsed the Conservative one. The Tories now have the single largest group of peers again, but they are some way off their historic dominance of the Upper House. Labour aides are dismissive of this theory however - they think it is more likely that the Treasury simply forgot that a statutory instrument could be used in this way. But it could be that defeat on Monday paves the way for a reassertion of Tory dominance in the weeks to come. 

For the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, David Cameron appeared under significant pressure at today's PMQs. Aware that an increasing number on his own side oppose the planned tax credit cuts, Cameron struggled with Corbyn's questions on the subject. 

Rather than opening with another email, the Labour leader wisely quoted Tory MP Heidi Allen's maiden speech condemning the policy and asked "where was she wrong?" Cameron replied by offering the standard defence that the government was introducing a "living wage" and raising the personal allowance (the problem being that 3.2 million families will still be worse off). He then unwisely added that he was "delighted" that the Commons voted in favour of tax credit cuts last night, a phrase that Labour has quickly pounced on.

Corbyn then highlighted how the self-employed would be hurt by the measure, appealing to the Tories' entrepreneurialism: "Does he not see the value of giving support to people trying to improve their lives?” he asked. When Cameron again refused to give ground, he reminded him of his broken pre-election promise: "This is all very strange because the prime minister seems to have changed his mind." But with Cameron squirming, Corbyn moved on to the steel crisis, allowing the PM some vital breathing space. To put him under greater pressure, the Labour leader needs to focus his six questions on one subject. 

Corbyn derided the government for being "dragged kicking and screaming to this House three times in the last eight days" over the steel crisis and for not having a "industrial strategy". But this was more comfortable territory for Cameron than tax credits. He did, however, revert to Flashman mode when he unwisely raged at Labour's "self-righteous lectures" in response to MPs' questions on the steel crisis. In contrast to the ill-tempered Cameron, Corbyn is honing his controlled, teacher-esque demeanour. "Thank you" he sternly replied when Conservative MPs ceased their baying. 

The most notable backbench question came from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked Cameron about the possibility of the House of Lords blocking the tax credit cuts. "This House has now decided twice in favour of this measure ... I think the House of Lords should listen to that very carefully and take note that it's for this House to make financial decisions," Cameron relied. But in their favour, peers will note that the Conservative manifesto contained no mention of the tax credit cuts. The document that the Tories appeal to when seeking to pass legislation is working against them in this instance.  

Michael Meacher, the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, has died following a short illness.

Meacher, who entered politics as a candidate in the 1968 by-election in Oldham West following the death of Labour MP Charles Hale, was a senior figure on the left of the party. Although he was defeated on a 17% swing in the by-election, he went on to regain the seat in the 1970 general election, and in 2015 held the seat with a majority of over 14,000.

Meacher served as a junior minister under both Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and sat in the Shadow Cabinet from 1983 to 1997, where he was a strong advocate for the party's left flank. He went on to serving as a junior minister in the government of Tony Blair until he was dismissed in 2003. Following his dismissal, Meacher continued to argue for left-wing politics, writing intermittently for the New Statesman, and helping to set up Left Futures, the influential blog of the Labour left. In the 2007 leadership election, Meacher attempted to stand against Gordon Brown but was unable to secure the nominations necessary to make the ballot. 

He nominated and supported Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership race, although his age meant he was not recalled to the frontbench. His death will trigger a by-election that will likely be a routine hold for the Labour party. 

In 1938 W H Auden wrote a poem entitled “The Novelist”, in which he contrasts the figure of the Poet, “encased in talent like a uniform”, who “can amaze us like a thunderstorm”, with the Novelist who, alternatively, must “struggle out of his boyish gift and learn/How to be plain and awkward . . . among the Just/Be just” and –

. . . among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

The comparison between these two types of writing – an essential literary dichotomy – is telling and, even though Auden was thinking of his friend Christopher Isherwood when he wrote this, it seems to me a very acute general depiction of what the realistic novelist must achieve if he or she is truly going to excel. The contrapuntal tension implicit in the poem is very present in the novels of John le Carré, as this fascinating biography makes clear – and indeed can be seen as one among several marked dualities that characterise both the life of the man and the work itself.

Almost all biographies start with a summation of the subject’s antecedents. The first remarkable aspect of Adam Sisman’s compendious and compelling account of the life of David Cornwell, the man behind the le Carré pseudonym, is that by page 40 Sisman is still elucidating the career and character of Cornwell’s extraordinary father, Ronnie. Ronnie Cornwell (1906-75) emerges from this account as a near-mythic figure – a part-time millionaire and international jailbird, a fraudster and charmer, a shameless conman and stalwart Freemason, a moral blackmailer and proud father, a chronic philanderer and indefatigable optimist. Not surprisingly, having a monstrous, domineering father like Ronnie proved a complicated psychological impediment to the young David (who was swiftly enlisted by his father as gofer and bagman when required), a disadvantage compounded when Ronnie’s wife, Olive, left home for another man when Cornwell and his older brother, Tony, were respectively five and seven. Abandoned by his mother, left to the tender mercies of Ronnie and his various girlfriends, Cornwell has described his childhood as a time of constant embarrassment and trepidation.

But Ronnie wanted only the best for his sons, and they were expensively educated at prep and, later, public schools. David went to Sherborne – a place he loathed – and he left, of his own accord, early, in 1948, at 16, preferring to move to Bern, Switzerland, where he learned fluent German. It was at this stage of his education that he was first recruited by consular officials at the British embassy to report on local left-wingers and fellow-travellers and another duality entered his life, that of the spy.

Cornwell was an occasional recruit, run as an agent in the field, and this tenuous connection with the security services continued as he followed the usual pattern of the time – National Service (he became a junior officer, of course) and then to Oxford to read modern languages. While at university he undertook more covert work for MI5, spying on his left-wing friends and associates, searching their rooms, writing reports on their political proclivities. It was a betrayal that clearly troubled him – leading a double life exacts a price on your conscience. There was another price to be paid, too. Thus far, thus seemingly respectable – Sherborne and Lincoln College – but the seedy, roller-coaster world of Ronnie Cornwell continually dogged him.

Ronnie sometimes seemed vastly rich (there was a Bentley with the number plate RC1) but then the cash would run out or the lawsuits arrive. School and university fees were not paid and financial rescue had to be negotiated by kindly benefactors. David Cornwell, a young English gent in the making, was often only one step ahead of the bailiffs and, sometimes, the law. Ronnie used his son regularly in his dubious negotiations and David, at the age of 20 – this was the grim, diminished world of postwar Britain, remember – also lived the high-life that Ronnie’s deals provided: skiing in St Moritz, grand hotels in Paris and gambling holidays in Monte Carlo. There was the perfect persona presented to the world – David married young, a family was started, and after Oxford he became a master at Eton – and there was the flashy, occasionally sordid backstory (Ronnie had a violent streak and would beat his new wife as well as fleece his friends and neighbours). The complexities of being David Cornwell were multiplying.

And then he became a proper spook. In 1958 Cornwell joined MI5 in an official capacity and soon moved to MI6, where in 1961 his fluency in German secured him a posting as a second secretary to Bonn, his cover. Sisman tells us more about Cornwell’s life in espionage than anyone else has managed to achieve but even he admits to a few gaps. In any event Cornwell’s life as a spy was fairly short-lived, a matter of approximately three years. He had started writing novels and another double had emerged – “John le Carré”. The pseudonym was necessary because of his secret work: his early novels had to be submitted to a Foreign Office committee to be vetted for any potential leaks.

By now, 1963, he was the father of two sons and chafing under the pettifogging social niceties of being a junior diplomat. One gets the sense of a man who never felt at home in the classic English institutions that seemed to shape him: boarding school boy, Oxford undergraduate, Eton schoolmaster, army officer, Foreign Office diplomat. The dark, omnipresent buried reality of being the son of Ronnie Cornwell appeared permanently destabilising.

Escape arrived in the shape of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Cornwell was paid an advance of £175 by his publisher, Victor Gollancz. Within a year of publication he was a millionaire. Everything had changed. The book was a success of massive proportions – not just in Britain but also in the United States and France and Germany. Very swiftly John le Carré became a successful international author, his novels selling in the hundreds of thousands, with all the financial rewards that arrive with this unprecedented level of success. In fact, as Sisman establishes, although the publishers’ advances were subsequently huge, the novels that followed – The Looking Glass War (1965), A Small Town in Germany (1968) – didn’t generate the same deluge of money as his first book. Le Carré, as we should now call him, entered a world of movie deals and high-profile, high-spending living. However, his marriage was in difficulties and he was contriving to spend as much time as possible away from his wife, Ann, and their young family as they settled into provisional tax exile.

Le Carré became friendly with another high-flying young author, James Kennaway, a Scot, who had known similar sudden acclaim and gain from his debut novel, Tunes of Glory (1956). Kennaway – slightly older, raffishly good-looking, middle-class, a serial adulterer – was also a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. They became very close friends, almost like brothers. All seemed really rather wonderful and heady as they shared the high-life together, planned movie scripts, speculated on future collaborations – and then le Carré began an affair with Kennaway’s wife, Susan.

Young novelist has affair – big deal. Except that this particular episode has produced three books, one from each of the participants in the love triangle: le Carré’s novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover, James Kennaway’s Some Gorgeous Accident and Susan Kennaway’s non-fiction account The Kennaway Papers. One of the unsought benefits of Sisman’s biography will be to quash the swirling rumours that have congregated around this liaison.

I myself was told, on good authority, that the affair between le Carré and Susan was deliberately engineered by Kennaway himself because he had writer’s block and needed a subject. The reality is more mundane – mutual attraction – but the consequences no less traumatic. The friendship between the authors was irretrievably damaged, although the Kennaway marriage survived until James died shortly afterwards (in 1968; he was 40 years old) of a massive heart attack. Le Carré and Susan remained in contact for a while. The affair has further literary interest in that The Naive and Sentimental Lover is perhaps the strangest novel (some would say the worst) in the le Carré canon and introduces yet another dichotomy that has a bearing on his life. The title is taken from concepts evolved by the German playwright Friedrich Schiller (le Carré’s work is full of references to German literature). Schiller differentiates between the naive man and the sentimental man – but the terms are not used in the sense that we commonly employ them. The naive man is spontaneous, natural, an artist. The sentimental man is “corrupted” by life in all its complexities and textures. One is reminded of Auden’s Poet figure, and his essential difference from the Novelist.

Le Carré saw himself as “sentimental” in the Schillerian sense and yet he longed to be “naive”, a true artist, as he thought Kennaway was. It is not too far-fetched to see these opposing themes enacted time and again in his life and his work.

Le Carré divorced his first wife, married again and had another son. He moved his principal residence to Land’s End while always keeping a base in London. After the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, regardless of the critical fortunes of his subsequent novels, le Carré never really knew any kind of professional failure. He became an exceptionally rich man, published globally, rewarded, honoured, his novels routinely filmed.

In 1993, for example, he would receive for his novel The Night Manager an advance of $5m from his American publishers and more than £500,000 from his British. After the critical pasting he took for The Naive and Sentimental Lover, acclaim returned with the “Quest for Karla” trilogy – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People– all adapted into legendary television productions. He has continued to be prolific, publishing a new novel every two or three years – engagé, disputacious, opinionated, still hard at work, now well into his eighties.

Inevitably the second half of le Carré’s life, that of a highly successful author, lacks some of the fizz and vim of the first half (Ronnie Cornwell’s death in 1975 brought a moment of real catharsis and closure for his son), but Sisman is excellent on the nuts and bolts of writing and of being published: inspiration, composition, deal-making, money accrued, critical reaction and so forth. As a professional novelist, I found the progress of le Carré’s later career compelling and revealing – changing publishers, changing agents, literary spats (with Salman Rushdie and Graham Lord) and the rest – but I can imagine it might not hold quite the same allure for someone not fully engaged in the business of being an author.

It must be difficult to write the life of a man who is still very much with us, and in the public eye, no matter how much liberty the biographer has been given to tell the story, warts and all. Sisman – a very fine and astute biographer – has done an excellent, not to say exemplary, job under the circumstances. Only rarely is one aware of a veil of discretion being drawn, of names not being named, yet it is impossible to imagine this Life being bettered – though le Carré’s own memoir, to be published in 2016, may add some gloss.

In considering this biography, a comparison comes to mind: there is something almost absurdly Dickensian about le Carré’s early life. He was abandoned by his mother as an infant; trusted to a corrupt, rackety and wilful father who was frequently bankrupted and imprisoned (as Dickens’s father was); tormented by feelings of class insecurity but eventually found fame and glory as a published writer under a pseudonym; and, in not-so-serene but well-heeled old age, recognised as a great English man of letters. Even his later so-called polemical novels have a whiff of the outraged Dickensian apostrophe about them, addressing the reader and pointedly making them aware of the injustice at large in the world.

Le Carré once wrote: “I saw the Berlin Wall go up when I was thirty and I saw it come down when I was sixty . . . I was chronicling my time . . . I lived the passion of my time.” So perhaps we should see him as our contemporary Dickens (there is also the mimicry, the voices, the relish of names), which, in the end, is not a bad epitaph: the Dickens of the Cold War. A designation that is all the more valid because it recognises his great merits as a serious writer.

What remains contentious about le Carre’s career as a novelist – and one thing he is very aware of – is another duality, namely that of the “genre writer” v the writer of serious literary fiction. The implication is that you cannot be one and the other at the same time. But what le Carré has achieved is to give the lie to this perceived duality in so far as it applies to spy fiction, for want of a better categorisation. Spy fiction, it seems to me, can’t easily be classified as a genre if only because so many so-called serious novelists have gladly and successfully taken it on. Joseph Conrad almost invented the category with The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Since then many novelists of the highest literary repute have written spy novels – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Norman Mailer, to name but three. In contemporary times so, too, have Ian McEwan, Sebastian Faulks and John Banville. In the same way that the fully achieved “historical” novel evades the genre category (no one would label The Spire, The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Wolf Hall as genre fiction) so, too, does the fully achieved spy novel.

The essential reason is easy to comprehend. Le Carré himself put it this way:

“I think all of us live partly in a clandestine situation . . . We hardly know ourselves – nine-tenths of ourselves are below the level of the water.”

The tropes of espionage – duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestinity, secret knowledge, the bluff, the double bluff, unknowingness, bafflement, shifting identity – are no more than the tropes of the life that every human being lives. The fully achieved, sophisticated espionage novel works precisely because in it you find all the troubling complexities of our own lives writ large. We all lie, we all pretend, we all betray – but in the spy novel you see those fundamental aspects of human behaviour, the human predicament, under a magnifying glass. The consequences may be more cataclysmic – walls may come down, bombs explode, deaths occur – but they find their exact and pertinent echo in our own quotidian experience.

What Joseph Conrad started, John le Carré enshrined and made modern. That is the real achievement of his great novels and why they will endure.

William Boyd’s most recent novel is Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury).

John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman is published by Bloomsbury (672pp, £25).

Dawn Butler MP, chair women's PLP article for New Statesman

Why the L word is the right word for Cameron and the tax credit cut.

If you call someone a liar in the House of Commons you get slapped down by the Speaker. If you say it on television you get a glare and a huffy comment from the presenter.

It’s not a charge that you should throw around lightly. I know that politicians can do things in politics that we all dislike but politicians can go about it in an honest and straightforward way.

Voters hate being lied to – ask Nick Clegg about that. I won my seat back from the Liberal Democrats who were heavily punished for deceiving voters.

I believe the L word is the only word that fits what David Cameron and George Osborne are doing with these cuts. So I said just that on the BBC’s Daily Politics

I didn’t get the chance to quote chapter and verse but here it is:

Question Time ‘Leaders Special’ April 2015

#1

Audience member: Will you put to bed rumours that you plan to cut child tax credit and restrict child benefit to two children?

David Cameron: No I don’t want to do that—this report that was out today is something I rejected at the time as Prime Minister and I reject it again today

David Dimbleby: You said you didn’t want to put to bed rumours that you were going to cut child tax credits—you meant you did want to put to bed the rumours?

David Cameron: Yes—we have increased child tax credits.

#2

David Dimbleby: “Clearly there are some people who are worried that you have a plan to cut child credit and tax credits. Are you saying absolutely as a guarantee, it will never happen?”

David Cameron: “First of all, child tax credit, we increased by £450..”

David Dimbleby: “And it’s not going to fall?”

David Cameron: “It’s not going to fall. Child benefit, to me, is one of the most important benefits there is. It goes directly to the family, normally to the mother, £20 for the first child, £14 for the second. It is the key part of families’ budgets in this country. That’s not what we need to change.”

Just a few weeks later that promise was broken when Osborne pushed the cut in tax credits through the Commons in July. It has taken Tory MPs time to wake up to what they voted for. This government certainly puts the “Con” in Conservatives.  

The spirit of deception lives on, Ministers’ claim that cuts in tax credits will be offset by increases in the minimum wage have been proved mathematically incorrect by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

And Gimmicky George Osborne is seeking to corrupt the concept of a Living Wage with something called the National Living Wage which isn’t a living wage at all. Confusing isn't it? As I said on the floor of the house like all good cons there is an element of truth - but the National Living Wage will not reach the limit to offset the tax credit changes until 2020. By then families will have lost thousands and thousands of pounds. Children would have lost years of learning through being hungry at school, and the cycle of poverty will live on. 

It may have become a bit of a cliché to talk about hard-working families – Andrew Marr had a go at my colleague Seema Malhotra for repeating the phrase -- but that’s exactly what they are. They are working hard and they didn’t cause the crash and it’s wrong that they should be made to pay for it.

A new report from the Trust for London shows that 1.2 million Londoners in poverty are in working households. That’s up 70 per cent on a year ago. That applies to many of my constituents in Brent. Nearly one in three of Brent residents are paid below the London Living Wage. Rent can take up as much as three quarters of their earnings. Across Brent Central 72 per cent of families with children will be affected by these tax cuts. In my constituency no fewer than 26,000 children will be affected by Cameron and Osborne’s tax credit cuts.

We were hoping that we could reduce the use of food banks, instead it looks like we will need a drive over Christmas to ensure that families can eat and with expectations that this will be the coldest winter in 50 years I do not want my families in Brent to have to make the choice between eating and heating. 

There has been some brilliant campaigning by the Mirror – which is what we might expect – but also by the Sun which highlighted the fact that the tax credit changes will hit 150,000 families with disabled children. They quote Amanda Batten, chief executive of charity Contact a Family, who said: “These cuts will affect a staggering 150,000 hardworking families with disabled children whose finances are already at breaking point.” 

Cameron and Osborne know that they will plunge more children into poverty. So what’s their answer? Another Con: they are getting rid of poverty targets.

When you piece it all together, the  L word doesn't seem that bad, there are probably a few other words people might want to use to describe this Government. 

A few weeks back, Stephenie Meyer pulled a Beyoncé: with virtually no advance warning, she released her latest title into the world – and set off a firestorm of conversation. Even the publishing industry was caught off guard by Life and Death, a new full-length novel written in honour of the tenth anniversary of the Twilight series. Any book from Meyer would have made headlines, but this one was especially surprising: Life and Death takes Twilight, the first book of the four, and swaps the genders of its protagonists. Meyer has battled criticisms about outdated and harmful gender roles for years, and the switch, a romance between female vampire Edythe and male human Beau, is meant to address that. She begins the book by writing:

“Bella has always gotten a lot of censure for getting rescued on multiple occasions, and people have complained about her being a typical damsel in distress. My answer to that has always been that Bella is a human in distress, a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains. She’s also been criticised for being too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing. But I’ve always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female – it’s still the same story. Gender and species aside, Twilight has always been a story about the magic and obsession and frenzy of first love.”

The same day Life and Death was published, Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel Carry On was released – and by contrast, not only did people know this one was coming out, it was one of the most hotly-anticipated books this autumn. Carry On’s origin story is unique, too: its protagonist, Simon Snow, the “worst Chosen One who’s ever been chosen”, originated in Rowell’s 2013 celebrated YA novel Fangirl, about a girl who writes fanfiction about the Harry Potter-esque Simon Snow series. Carry On is a self-contained (and utterly magical) work, but it also sits side-by-side with two other texts about Simon Snow: the “canonical” excerpts in Fangirl by the “original” author Gemma T Leslie and the fanfic written by Fangirl’s protagonist, Cath.

Like Life and Death, part of the pleasure and intrigue of Carry On lies in these intertextual relationships. But when Life and Death and Carry On have been mentioned in the same breath these past few weeks, it was most often to call them works of fanfiction. It’s undeniable that both books employ techniques that are popular with fanfiction writers, who do things like gender-bending or filling in gaps all the time – if you’re fanfictionally-inclined, you’re always looking for another way into a story. And they’re doing what the best fanfiction does: engaging in a conversation with another work, or a whole host of other works. I wrote about this regarding Carry On upon the book’s release, and even though Stephenie Meyer has declared Life and Death “not a real book” (which is confusing but she can call it what she wants?), it’s still a text written in relation to another text, a critical tool even if it’s meant as a response to her critics.

But these books are not fanfiction: an author can’t write fanfiction for her own work, even if she’s a fan of herself. And that distinction might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s actually at the heart of some of the major tensions that have been playing out over the past few years, as fanfiction has been exposed, mainstreamed, and – to some degree – accepted. In the past, someone calling a published, original work “fanfiction” would have been meant as an insult – this kind of claim is usually aimed at female authors and female readers, suggesting their work is derivative or self-indulgent or full of the sorts of tropes for which fanfiction has historically been maligned, like privileging emotional dialogue, or romance before (or in addition to) action. People still lob this comparison as an insult, no matter how tone deaf this sort of thing looks these days. “This reads like bad fanfiction” doesn’t have a lot of weight when it’s clear that the person issuing the claim hasn’t so much as looked at a fanfiction archive in his life.

But we’re increasingly seeing people call things “fanfiction” as a compliment, meant to lift up both fanfiction and the work that draws the comparison. Some of this is grounded in historical precedent: when we reference famous works of literature that play fanfiction’s games, we work to ground our modern practices in the “seriousness” of literary history. Sometimes we talk about bigger ideas of influence and retelling – like, say, much of Shakespeare’s work – but sometimes our examples get as specific as the tropes that fill the best fic. Two of the most famous modern examples, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, both take minor characters from famous works (Hamlet and Jane Eyre, respectively) and twist the stories from their perspectives. The first piece I ever published about fanfiction, during the explosion of 50 Shades of Grey and the resulting media narrative that painted the vast world of fanfiction as a tawdry black hole, was explicitly meant to draw these comparisons, to suggest that fic deserves just as much intellectual praise as “real” literature.

But I’m not sure I could write that piece today. Is Shakespeare is fanfiction? On some level, sure. On another level, not even close. There are a few arguments at play here. When it comes to literature, drawing arbitrary lines between “influenced by” and “something like fanfiction” is a dangerous game: every single book has been influenced by other books, since no author springs fully formed out of the womb. Fanfiction writers approach their texts with the intention of writing fanfiction. It’s not just saying, “I love this work so much, I’m going to do something more with it.” It’s calling the act “fanfiction”, and entering into the community of people who write and read it. And often times joining a fanfiction community is as simple as reading a few stories; the vast majority of people who like fanfiction just read it, and often quietly, without participating in the free and instant exchange of feedback between authors and readers.

The trouble with the “it’s all fanfiction” argument is it’s not all fanfiction. That’s partly due the intent of the writer – who she chooses to write for, the kind of text she chooses to create, and how she chooses to share it – and it’s partly due to the imbalance of power between the people who write and read fanfiction and the people who create the source material for those works. Between fan and creator, it’s a deliberately one-sided exchange – at least, until people start to show showrunners or actors fanworks (please don’t!) – that’s integral to the dynamics of modern fanfiction communities. The multi-sided conversations that happen between fans, readers and writers alike, make fanfiction unique in the landscape of modern literature.

But it’s also about who gets to write the stories that we play with. We are a culture obsessed with reworking and retelling and rebooting. Our stories can feel stale as they’re hashed out again and again, but there’s also a thrill in the variation, in the way that each new comic-book adaptation or film remake has the potential to shift our perspective lens into the story and illuminate something new. And there’s an increasingly popular narrative that our reboot culture is just fanfiction with another name. Steven Moffat alternates his time between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who fic. The Marvel Cinematic Universe does the same thing that Marvel fanfic writers have done since the dawn of comics. J J Abrams is writing in a new fandom now – and the trailer for his first Star Wars fic looks awesome!

I appreciate these comparisons – but they frustrate me all the same. Big-budget reworkings of beloved stories are almost universally helmed by men; no-budget fanfiction universes are overwhelmingly helmed by women. And these female-authored texts partly exist to shift the text away from that default perspective, the one that usually pens and directs the source material, populated largely by men (and by straight, white men in particular). I regularly see someone arguing that Steven Moffat is writing Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and I can’t agree: he is writing an adaptation for television, with all the cultural limits and benefits that that affords. He is playing the same game as millions of fanfiction writers, but he’s in a different stadium.

It comes down, as it often does, to money. Because money, and a lack of it, is at the heart of long-held tensions about fanworks. Fanfiction is overwhelmingly the product of unpaid labour, millions and millions of words given freely, whether for legal reasons or community norms. Because it isn’t compensated – and because it is so often done by women it is devalued, as an art form and as a way to spend one’s time. When money is added to the mix, whether in giant pull-to-publish book deals or, increasingly, fanfiction contests and authors sponsored by television networks and Hollywood studios, the place that fanworks occupy in the vast sphere of adaptation and reworking begins to shift. And not always for the better.

The mainstreaming of fandom – and, perhaps grudgingly, of fanfiction – could very well put an end to the maligning of the practice, to fic as punch line or fic only as some kind of training wheels for reading and writing “real” literature. Maybe we won’t feel the need to call original, published texts “fanfiction”, because most people will understand the complexities of the practice, and the value of these works. (This is a pretty exciting and possibly unrealistic vision of the future.) And money helps move this along, for better or worse, though admittedly it’s a bit grim to say that if you’ve spent a lifetime valuing fanworks for the pleasure they bring, and appreciating their non-commercial nature.  

The greatest help to the disparity between these practices will be to see more women – way more women – in the role of creator as well as fan. If fanfiction has partly developed over the years to subvert the male gaze, then we need a media landscape where that gaze isn’t so prevalent – one where it isn’t the default perspective. Where a female-authored Sherlock Holmes adaptation gets a prime spot on BBC One – because if we’re all playing the same game, why should only a privileged few get a spot in the stadium?

The government’s proposed changes to tax credits are about as bad as they get. They will effectively punish low income people for working, and make it difficult for parents on low incomes to make ends meet. Given how damaging these proposals are, you’d hope a convincing alternative would be being advocated. Sadly, that is not the case. The main alternative policy is being put forward by Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead, and while it is not entirely without merit, it also has flaws which could make implementing it a complete disaster.

The government plans to cut tax credits by reducing the amount a person can earn before the government takes away their tax credits, and increasing the speed at which the government takes away their tax credits as they earn. Frank Field proposes that for those on the National Minimum Wage (NMW) working less than full time, the Government should not withdraw tax credits at a faster rate, but for those earning above the NMW to see their tax credits withdrawn at an even faster pace.

At first glance this may sound like a good idea, as it would protect workers on the very lowest incomes from cuts. But it would also have disastrous consequences for many people on very low pay. The Government’s proposals will significantly increase how much the working poor will lose from each extra pound they earn, but Frank Field’s proposals would raise this to 97 per cent lost of every extra pound. Field’s proposals would mean that if a family earning the minimum wage, of around £13,000 a year, managed to get a massive raise of £10,000 taking them to the average wage for the whole country of £23,000, they would only be £300 better off. This completely destroys the incentives to progress from their current position.

In reality, people don’t get offered £10,000 raises very often. Increases in wages and hours often happen in small amounts. Extra work comes at the cost of more stress and often forces parents to spend less time with young children. If extra work that ostensibly increased your pay by £100 and meant that you spent a few hours less with your children only actually made you £3 better off, you’d think twice about taking it.  For all the talk of helping people “work their way out of poverty” the evidence suggests this policy will actually make it harder for them to do so.

This is already a problem under the current system. Both the Resolution Foundation and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development have found in separate studies of barriers to progressing out of low pay, that often people don’t take promotions because the extra pay is not worth the stress. The Governments changes will not help here, but Frank Field’s suggestion would be even worse. They wouldn’t create a glass ceiling for those looking to progress so much as a brick wall.  

If you are looking for a credible alternative to tax credits cuts without increasing the deficit the answer is simple, stop cutting taxes for the rich. If the Government reverse their commitment to increase the personal allowance, raise the 40p threshold, cut inheritance tax and other sops to the richest, it wouldn’t need to hit the poor at all. 

Being removed from the cancer ward for shouting at my mum was not one of my proudest moments. Oddly, though, it’s now one of my fondest memories of her. As long as we could have a row, she was still there. Even though she was dying.

Her energy was strong even though she was skeletal. As were most people on the ward.

“That one over there has his eye on me,” she told me, gesturing to some grey, bony man. She was the sort of woman who thought all men fancied her. As a result, they mostly seemed to.

Though extremely ill, she was still holding off from marrying her devoted boyfriend in case someone better came along.

“I’m not marrying someone just because I’ve got cancer,” she said. “That’s so morbid.”

They’d met when she was on some kind of blind date at the local pub. Apparently her date wasn’t up to much.

“He bought me a drink that didn’t even cover the bottom of the glass.”

This was my mother’s description of a single.

Mike was over the other side of the bar. “I’ll buy you a proper drink.”

And that was that. He loved her and was a decent man. But he did not excite her. She liked to go places, but when they went for a drive, if he got too far out of Ipswich he used to veer off into a lay-by, unable to cope. She was always looking for something else. He was always looking for things to stay the same. Yet the something else that I was dismayed her.

I’d gone to tell her that I was going to meet the editor of the Guardian about a job.

She was deeply unimpressed. “I’ve never heard of it.”

I was wearing a leather jacket that had cost me a fortune.

“You’re not going like that, are you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“No one will give you a job looking like that!”

“Mum,” I said, “they don’t employ me because of what I look like. It’s for what I write.”

She had no truck with that and never would.

It was a familiar attitude to me. Whenever I bought paper from the office supplies opposite where I lived, the man in there would say, “Just doing a bit of typing, love?”

When I did go home and read a lot, my mother told everyone I had post-natal depression. How else could all this reading be explained? The thing people don’t understand about class is that it functions as an open prison.

In the hospital, though, she was driving me mad.

“You really need to make more of yourself.”

“For God’s sakes, Mum.”

At this point two nurses came over and told us we were upsetting everyone.

I left in tears but awed at her life force. In her eyes I never did make much of myself, but I know that what I’ve made is made from her. And somehow that is more than enough.

For many Labour MPs, the party's general election defeat and Jeremy Corbyn's victory were symptomatic of an absence of intellectual renewal. Corbyn's opponents speak of how they lacked an alternative project and vision compelling enough to win over voters. After Ed Miliband declared the end of New Labour in 2010, it felt to many that the questions the party needed to answer were simply deferred. 

As they adjust to the post-election landscape, MPs are looking for sources of renewal. It is with this aim that a new group, Labour Together, will soon be launched, I can reveal. Those involved include former policy review head Jon Cruddas, former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy, former shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, peer Maurice Glasman and Croydon North MP Steve Reed. The group also has broad local government support. "New and Blue have to come together," a source told me, in reference to New Labour and Blue Labour. "The group is aimed at achieving that." The source added that to thrive its membership would need to be as broad-based as possible, ideally including supporters of "all four leadership campaigns". Non-Corbynites are asking how the party's hitherto disparate factions - Blairites, Brownites, the soft left, the old right - can be united around common aims. 

Unlike Labour for the Common Good, the PLP body launched earlier this year by Hunt and Umunna, Labour Together will operate outside of Westminster. In a recent interview with the Spectator, Cruddas spoke of his intention to create a new group, remarking that "a lot of the old internal factions, the internal architecture, seems to belong to a different era, really, be they Progress or Compass or the Fabians". Labour Together is the result. When I interviewed him in July, Umunna argued that the party needed new "incubators of ideas" to "reboot and rethink how we do modern social democracy in Britain in an era of globalisation". 

The group's imminent launch follows the recent creation of the Corbyn-aligned Momentum, which some MPs fear will become a vehicle for deselection (a claim its directors reject). Labour First, the old right network founded in 1988, has increased its activity in an attempt to prevent the left achieving greater influence through internal selection contests and policy votes. Progress, the group founded by allies of Tony Blair in 1996, is also continuing to operate, declaring in a recent editorial: "A chapter has closed. The era of New Labour is over. It is living history to some, but history nonetheless. A Next Left chapter must now be written for Labour." 

“Paedophile protector!” yelled a man outside the Home Affairs select committee room as its chairman, Keith Vaz MP, pushed past the crowd flooding the committee corridor. An unpleasant tension hung in the air throughout the gruelling four-hour hearing that followed.

In an investigation into the late Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary and Conservative peer, MPs questioned the Labour MP involved in the proceedings, Tom Watson – as well as senior police officers and prosecutors– about their conduct in relation to a rape allegation against Brittan, for which no charges were brought.

But the question at the heart of the hearing was how far Watson’s actions influenced the police.

The recently elected deputy Labour leader became a conduit for the alleged victim in this case, referred to as “Jane” – among hundreds of other alleged victims who came to him – and the police.

Publicity he drummed up around the allegation, and the letter he wrote to the director of public prosecutions calling for a review after the case was dropped, have brought Watson’s role into question. He has variously been characterised as a voice for the vulnerable by his supporters and a “fantasist” by his detractors.

Giving evidence, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Settle, who headed the original investigation, didn’t do much to help Watson’s reputation. He slammed Labour’s deputy leader for what he saw as a “betrayal” of their working relationship; Watson sent the letter calling to reopen the investigation without consulting him. Settle – who had been briefing Watson on the case – said the MP had been “very supportive” until the letter.

“I am extremely disappointed . . . rather shocked. I saw it as a betrayal, to be perfectly honest.” said Settle. “I saw it as a very low blow . . . I felt that it undermined our investigation.”

He added: “It confused matters considerably – distracted us, shook confidence within the team . . . undermined us.”

He revealed to the committee his warning that pursuing the case – which “fell at the first hurdle” regarding evidence – would have been a “baseless witchhunt”.

Tom Watson himself was asked by the committee about the wisdom and motivations of his involvement in the case – and in those of other alleged victims. “Is that really your job? You’re not Sherlock Holmes,” Vaz reminded him.

“You are a member of parliament, not a police officer,” Victoria Atkins MP added.

Other attacks included Watson’s “political interest” in being involved in the story, and a description of him as a “fantasist who out of the blue takes up allegations” that have no evidential basis.

Although denying all of these accusations, Watson apologised for calling Brittan “close to evil”.

“I do regret using that emotive language – I shouldn’t have done and I am sincerely sorry for repeating it,” he said. “I’m very sorry for the distress caused and I am very sorry for her [Lady Brittan’s] wider family. I know they are very angry and they clearly loved Leon Brittan very much and they are angry on behalf of their family member and I am very sorry.”

WARNING: This blog is for people watching The Apprentice. Contains spoilers!

Read up on episode 2 here.

It’s the candidates’ day off. You can tell from their passive-aggressive loungewear. In the Bloomsbury mansion inescapably “laid on” by Lord Sugar, the men are playing videogames and the women are making detox juices. Equality is dying of a broken heart somewhere out of shot.

But it’s soon time to whip off their boxfresh trackies and get ready – Sugar and his cronies, Lady Brady and The Egg, want to meet the candidates in Dover Castle’s wartime tunnels.

It turns out this is purely for a tortured extended military metaphor about this week’s task: buying the requisite tat from shops in Calais and Kent. “I’m sending you on your own mission...you have to choose a commander-in-chief,” Sugar informs them. A little insulting to the memory of the heroes of Dunkirk, but, y’know, for what did our ancestors perish other than hollow reality television formats?

“Social media entrepreneur” Vana decides she wants to lead team Connexus into battle (etc etc), but so does the perpetually sour construction executive Elle. “Anyone who wants Elle to be project manager, raise your hands,” sighs Vana. No one raises their hand. Not even Elle.

The men choose Joseph, whose villainous pencil moustache gives him the air of a comedy Disney mafioso rat. “They’re all pretty ladies and that might sway the old French men,” is Whiskers Valente’s main fear once he’s been made project manager. Hopefully those old French men will beat him with baguettes.

Each team splits into a Kent and Calais contingent, who set out to buy – as cheaply as possible – all the items on Alan Sugar’s list of random junk. The Megalomaniac’s Miscellany, if you will. When compiling this catalogue, Sugar and his backroom listmakers seem to have missed the clunking poor taste of demanding the purchase of a rubber dinghy when half the task is set in Calais, but, y’know, for what are desperate migrants struggling to Britain other than hollow reality television formats?

Jenny – whose dad is “actually an antiques collector”, by the way – attempts to find Leavers Lace (a northern French thing) from the back of a cab in Kent by inexplicably calling up a Japanese college. “Can I speak to one of the lecturers?” “No.”

Brett helpfully explains to a farmer that he needs manure “for fertilisation purposes”, and the men’s team scrambles around a farm collecting it in bags free of charge. It’s not long until the women cotton on and do the same, but this is inevitably shot with incredulous close-ups of their dirty shoes. As if the bozos on the men’s team aren’t bothered about mucking up their violently burnished brogues.

Richard wants to be “the charming, bumbling English guy” when attempting to purchase the mandatory cheese. “Le whole?” he slurps, gesturing vaguely at the cheese counter. “Best prix?” God knows how he left the fromagerie with the fromage correct.

“You led the negotiation,” Joseph says approvingly. (Translation: “You bought some cheese.”)

“Lunchtime, France,” the voiceover almost sniggers as the men stand outside a closed antique shop scratching their heads, in their search for a Louis-Philippe mirror. “Lewis Fileep-ay Mirrah?” Joseph says at a few elderly French people once they’ve finished their déjeun-ay. Somehow they bag this one too.

The women have a far more difficult time of it. Elle and her subteam go back and forth to a small boat shop on the Kent coast, deliberating over its pricey dinghy. “I don’t know what to do,” she murmurs on the third visit, melancholy descending on the Medway. The music turns ominous. The shopkeeper looks appalled. The dinghy looks increasingly seductive. “This woman is going to think we’re mental,” sighs Elle, as they head in for the fourth time and buy the dinghy.

This turns out to be their downfall. In his customary pointless summary, Sugar informs the boardroom this task was about “strategically planning certain items where they should be found”, which the women did worse than their rivals by spending most money.

Jenny is fired. “She was just – not very good,” muses Claude, who really hasn’t mastered the aggressive Apprentice rhetoric yet.

Candidates to watch:

Joseph

Whiskers Valente might put someone’s head through a Lewis Fileep-ay mirror before this series is through.

David

Sweet and upbeat, mainly. Where’s his fatal flaw?

Selina

“Mon père est mort,” she cried as she bought some snails. A uniquely dark negotiating technique.

I'll be blogging The Apprentice each week. Click here for the previous episode blog. The Apprentice airs weekly at 9pm, Wednesday night on BBC One.